Transport networks of today need to provide cost-effective transport for various types of client information, including multi-service traffic ranging from synchronous traffic (e.g., DS-1, DS-3, and STS-12) to asynchronous traffic (e.g., Internet Protocol (IP), Ethernet, and Asynchronous Transport Mode (ATM). Increasingly, service providers are operating their circuit-oriented services over transport networks based on synchronous optical network (SONET) or synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) and their connectionless services over packet transport networks based on Ethernet, Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS), IP, or combinations thereof.
Service providers offer such services to their customers under terms specified in contractual service level agreements or SLAs. The terms specified in the SLAs set forth deliverables against which the performances of the services are to be measured. To effectively manage their customer relationships, service providers thus want to be able to monitor their services as they are transported over the transport network, to ensure that each service is performing in accordance with its corresponding SLA.
Traditionally, responsibility for the proper operation of the transport network resides with a network operational support system (OSS), also referred to as network management. Network management performs a variety of management functions, including fault management, configuration or provisioning management, accounting, performance monitoring, and security. To accomplish these functions, the network elements in the transport network collect or generate information to be made available to the network management. This information is indicative of the functional performance of the transport facility (i.e., the network elements, paths, and links in the transport network), and is referred to as network-related information.
In contrast to the roles of the network management, service providers are responsible for order fulfillment, service assurance, and billing. In effect, the service providers manage the customers of their services and maintain customer relationships; when customers are experiencing problems with their services, they interact with their service providers. Often problems occur in the transport network of which service providers are unaware, unless notified thereof by a customer or alerted thereto by the network management.
Nonetheless, a service provider typically needs to consult with network management to obtain information necessary to corroborate or refute the customer's problem. Even then, the network-related information obtained from the network management does not directly identify any specific service. Consequently, the service provider must refer to other sources of information, such as telephone logs of customer calls and databases cross-referencing network resources to services, to piece together the full picture of a service's performance. Service providers encounter this same difficulty when network management alerts them of problems encountered in the transport network; the network-related information given to the service providers does not directly identify any affected service.
This inability to ascertain their services' performances handicaps service providers in the execution of their other service management functions. Without the ability to monitor a service's performance, it is difficult to determine if the service is performing in accordance with the SLA. Consequently, current SLAs tend not to specify significant detail about the service. Similarly, service providers lack service-specific metrics by which they can design (i.e., engineer) their transport networks for supporting the services properly. Moreover, the difficulty in correlating network problems to specific services complicates the task of billing customers accurately for their purchased services; customers expect to pay less than full price for services that did not perform as expected, but service providers experience inefficiencies when attempting to verify service downgrades and outages. Thus, there is a need for a system and method that enable service and network management functions to be more effectively executed than current techniques.